Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories (33 page)

“Painters do that,” I said, and the sheriff remembered his roots well enough to know that I meant a mountain lion, not a fellow with an easel. We called them painters in the old days, when there were more of them in the mountains than just a scream and a shadow every couple of years. City people think I’m crazy to live on the mountain where the wild creatures are, and then they shut themselves up in cities with the most pitiless killers ever put on this earth—each other. I marvel at the logic.

“Since you reckon he’s leaving his victims in one area, why haven’t you searched it?”

“Oh, we have,” said the sheriff, looking weary. “I’ve had volunteers combing that mountain, and they haven’t turned up a thing. There’s a lot of square miles of forest to cover up there. Besides, I think our man has been more careful about concealment this time. What we need is more help. Not more searchers, but a more precise location.”

“Where do I come in? You said you wanted me to do more than just find the body. Not that I can even promise to do that.”

“I want to get your permission to try something that may help us catch this individual,” Spencer Arrowood was saying.

“What’s that?”

“I want you to give some newspaper interviews. Local TV, even, if we can talk them into it. I want to publicize the fact that you are gong to search for Amy Albright on Locust Ridge. Give them your background as a psychic and healer. I want a lot of coverage on this.”

I shuddered. You didn’t have to be psychic to foresee the outcome of that. A stream of city people in colorless cars, wanting babies and diet tonics.

“When were you planning to search for the body, Rattler?”

“I was waiting on you. Any day will suit me, as long as it isn’t raining. Rain distracts me.”

“Okay, let’s announce that you’re conducting the psychic search on Locust Ridge next Tuesday. I’ll send some reporters out here to interview you. Give them the full treatment.”

“How does all this harassment help you catch the killer, Spencer?”

“This is not for publication, Rattler, but I think we can smoke him out,” said the sheriff. “We announce in all the media that you’re going to be dowsing for bones on Tuesday. We insist that you can work wonders, and that we’re confident you’ll find Amy. If the killer is a local man, he’ll see the notices, and get nervous. I’m betting that he’ll go up there Monday night, just to make sure the body is still well-hidden. There’s only one road into that area. If we can keep the killer from spotting us, I think he’ll lead us to Amy’s body.”

“That’s fine, Sheriff, but how are you going to track this fellow in the dark?”

Spencer Arrowood smiled. “Why, Rattler,” he said, “I’ve got the Sight.”

You have to do what you can to keep a sheep killer out of your fold, even if it means talking to a bunch of reporters who don’t know ass from aardvark. I put up with all their fool questions, and dispensed about a dozen jugs of comfrey and chamomile tea, and I even told that blond lady on Channel Seven that she didn’t need any herbs for getting pregnant, because she already was, which surprised her so much that she almost dropped her microphone, but I reckon my hospitality worked to Spencer Arrowood’s satisfaction, because he came along Monday afternoon to show me a stack of newspapers with my picture looking out of the page, and he thanked me for being helpful.

“Don’t thank me,” I said. “Just let me go with you tonight. You’ll need all the watchers you can get to cover that ridge.”

He saw the sense of that, and agreed without too much argument. I wanted to see what he meant about having the Sight, because I’d known him since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, and he didn’t have so much as a flicker of the power. None of the Arrowoods did. But he was smart enough in regular ways, and I knew he had some kind of ace up his sleeve.

An hour past sunset that night I was standing in a clearing on Locust Ridge, surrounded by law enforcement people from three counties. There were nine of us. We were so far from town that there seemed to be twice as many stars, so dark was that October sky without the haze of streetlights to bleed out the fainter ones. The sheriff was talking one notch above a whisper, in case the suspect had come early. He opened a big cardboard box, and started passing out yellow-and-black binoculars.

“These are called ITT Night Mariners,” he told us. “I borrowed ten pair from a dealer at Watauga Lake, so take care of them. They run about $2,500 apiece.”

“Are they infrared?” somebody asked him.

“No. But they collect available light and magnify it up to 20,000 times, so they will allow you excellent night vision. The full moon will give us all the light we need. You’ll be able to walk around without a flashlight, and you’ll be able to see obstacles, terrain features, and anything that’s out there moving around.”

“The military developed this technology in Desert Storm,” said Deputy LeDonne.

“Well, let’s hope it works for us tonight,” said the sheriff. “Try looking through them.”

I held them up to my eyes. They didn’t weigh much—about the same as two apples, I reckoned. Around me, everybody was muttering surprise, tickled pink over this new gadget. I looked through mine, and I could see the dark shapes of trees up on the hill—not in a clump, the way they look at night, but one by one, with spaces between them. The sheriff walked away from us, and I
could see him go, but when I took the Night Mariners down from my eyes, he was gone. I put them back on, and there he was again.

“I reckon you do have the
Sight
, Sheriff,” I told him. “Your man won’t know we’re watching him with these babies.”

“I wonder if they’re legal for hunting,” said a Unicoi County man. “This sure beats spotlighting deer.”

“They’re illegal for deer,” Spencer told him. “But they’re perfect for catching sheep killers.” He smiled over at me. “Now that we’ve tested the equipment, y’all split up. I’ve given you your patrol areas. Don’t use your walkie-talkies unless it’s absolutely necessary. Rattler, you just go where you please, but try not to let the suspect catch you at it. Are you going to do your stuff?”

“I’m going to try to let it happen,” I said. It’s a gift. I don’t control it. I just receive.

We went our separate ways. I walked awhile, enjoying the new magic of seeing the night woods same as a possum would, but when I tried to clear my mind and summon up that other kind of seeing, I found I couldn’t do it. So, instead of helping, the Night Mariners were blinding me. I slipped the fancy goggles into the pocket of my jacket, and stood there under an oak tree for a minute or two, trying to open my heart for guidance. I whispered a verse from Psalm 27:
Teach me thy way, O Lord, and lead me in a plain path, because of mine enemies
. Then I looked up at the stars and tried to think of nothing. After a while I started walking, trying to keep my mind clear and go where I was led.

Maybe five minutes later, maybe an hour, I was walking across an abandoned field overgrown with scrub cedars. The moonlight glowed in the long grass, and the cold air made my ears and fingers tingle. When I touched a post of the broken split-rail fence, it happened. I saw the field in daylight. I saw brown grass, drying up in the
summer heat, and flies making lazy circles around my head. When I looked down at the fence rail at my feet, I saw her. She was wearing a watermelon-colored T-shirt and jean shorts. Her brown hair spilled across her shoulders and twined with the chicory weeds. Her eyes were closed. I could see a smear of blood at one corner of her mouth, and I knew. I looked up at the moon, and when I looked back, the grass was dead, and the darkness had closed in again. I crouched behind a cedar tree before I heard the footsteps.

They weren’t footsteps, really. Just the swish sound of boots and trouser legs brushing against tall, dry grass. I could see his shape in the moonlight, and he wasn’t one of the searchers. He was here to keep his secrets. He stepped over the fence rail, and walked toward the one big tree in the clearing—a twisted old maple, big around as two men. He knelt down beside that tree, and I saw him moving his hands on the ground, picking up a dead branch, and brushing leaves away. He looked, rocked back on his heels, leaned forward, and started pushing the leaves back again.

They hadn’t given me a walkie-talkie, and I didn’t hold with guns, though I knew he might have one. I wasn’t really part of the posse. Old Rattler with his Twinkies and his root tea and his prophecies. I was just bait. But I couldn’t risk letting the sheep killer slip away. Finding the grave might catch him; might not. None of my visions would help Spencer in a court of law, which is why I mostly stick to dispensing tonics and leave evil alone.

I cupped my hands to my mouth and gave an owl cry, loud as I could. Just one. The dark shape jumped up, took a couple of steps up and back, moving its head from side to side.

Far off in the woods, I heard an owl reply. I pulled out the Night Mariners then, and started scanning the hillsides around that meadow, and in less than a minute I could make out the sheriff, with that badge pinned to his
coat, standing at the edge of the trees with his field glasses on, scanning the clearing. I started waving and pointing.

The sheep killer was hurrying away now, but he was headed in my direction, and I thought,
Risk it. What called your name, Rattler, wasn’t an owl
. So just as he’s about to pass by, I stepped out at him, and said, “Hush now. You’ll scare the deer.”

He was startled into screaming, and he swung out at me with something that flashed silver in the moonlight. As I went down, he broke into a run, crashing through weeds, noisy enough to scare the deer across the state line—but the moonlight wasn’t bright enough for him to get far. He covered maybe twenty yards before his foot caught on a fieldstone, and he went down. I saw the sheriff closing distance, and I went to help, but I felt lightheaded all of a sudden, and my shirt was wet. I was glad it wasn’t light enough to see colors in that field. Red was never my favorite.

I opened my eyes and shut them again, because the flashing orange light of the rescue squad van was too bright for the ache in my head. When I looked away, I saw cold and dark, and knew I was still on Locust Ridge. “Where’s Spencer Arrowood?” I asked a blue jacket bending near me.

“Sheriff! He’s coming around.”

Spencer Arrowood was bending over me then, with that worried look he used to have when a big one hit his fishing line. “We got him,” he said. “You’ve got a puncture in your lung that will need more than herbal tea to fix, but you’re going to be all right, Rattler.”

“Since when did you get the Sight?” I asked him. But he was right. I needed to get off that mountain and get well, because the last thing I saw before I went down was the same scene that came to me when I first saw her get out of her car and walk toward my cabin. I saw what
Evelyn Albright was going to do at the trial, with that flash of silver half hidden in her hand, and I didn’t want it to end that way.

T
HE FACE WAS
a little blurry, but she was used to seeing it that way. She must have looked at it a thousand times in old magazines—grainy black-and-white shots, snapped by a magazine photographer at a nightclub; amateurish candid photos on the back of record albums; misty publicity stills that erased even the pores of his skin. She knew that face. A poster-sized version of it had stared down at her from beneath the high school banner on her bedroom wall, twenty-odd years ago. God, had it been that long? Now the face was blurry with booze, fatigue, and the sagging of a jawline that was no longer boyish. But it was still him, sitting in the bar, big as life.

Maggie used to wonder what she would do if she met him in the flesh. In the tenth grade she and Kathy Ryan used to philosophize about such things at slumber parties: “Why don’t you fix your hair like Connie Stevens’s?” “Which Man from U.N.C.L.E. do you like best?” “What would you do if you met Devlin Robey?” Then they’d collapse in giggles, unable even to fantasize meeting a real, live rock ’n’ roll singer. He lived a glamorous life of limousines and penthouse suites while they suffered through gym class, and algebra with Mrs. Cady. Growing up seemed a hundred years away.

When Maggie was a senior, she did get to see Devlin
Robey. When you live on Long Island, sooner or later your prince will come. Everybody comes to the Big Apple. But the encounter was as distant and unreal as the airbrushed poster on her closet door. Devlin Robey was a shining blur glimpsed on a distant stage, and Maggie was a tiny speck in a sea of screaming adolescents. She and Kathy squealed and cried and threw paper roses at the stage, but it didn’t really feel like
seeing
him. He was a lot clearer on the television screen when she watched
American Bandstand
. After the concert, they had fought their way through a horde of fans to reach the stage door, only to be driven off by three thugs in overcoats—Mr. Robey’s
handlers
—while Devlin himself plowed his way through the throng to a waiting limousine, oblivious to the screams of protest in his wake.

They cried all the way home.

Maggie was so disillusioned by her idol’s callous behavior that she wrote him a letter, in care of his record company, complaining about how he let his fans be treated. She enclosed her ticket stub from the concert, and one of her wallet-size class pictures. A few weeks later, she received an autographed eight-by-ten of Devlin Robey, a copy of his latest album, and a handwritten apology on Epic Records notepaper. He said he was sorry to rush past them like that, but that he’d had to hurry back to the hotel to call his mother, who had been ill that night. He hoped that Maggie would forgive him for his thoughtlessness, and he promised to visit with his fans after concerts whenever he possibly could.